CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/2/2026

[Patrick Ryan]

Korea, Legal, Unification Church, Religious Apologists

Dawn: South Korea’s ex-first lady jailed for 20 months in bribery case

"A South Korean judge handed the country’s former first lady Kim Keon Hee 20 months in jail on Wednesday [1/28/26] for accepting lavish gifts from a cult-like church, but acquitted her of alleged stock manipulation and other charges.

Controversy has long followed 53-year-old Kim, while accusations of graft, influence peddling and even academic fraud have dominated her husband Yoon Suk Yeol’s time in office. Both are now in custody — Yoon for actions taken during his disastrous declaration of martial law in December 2024 and Kim for corruption.

On Wednesday, Judge Woo In-sung of the Seoul Central District Court found Kim guilty of corruption and sentenced her to 20 months in prison. She was found to have accepted lavish bribes from the cult-like Unification Church — including a Chanel bag and a Graff necklace.

Prosecutors requested 15 years, but Kim was acquitted of stock manipulation and violations of campaign financing laws on Wednesday, and received a far lighter sentence. Woo said that Kim’s close proximity to the president had given her “significant influence” that she had taken advantage of.

“One’s position must never become a means of pursuing private gain,” he added. The former first lady sat in court as the sentence was read out, wearing a black suit, a white face mask and glasses.

Kim later released a statement apologising for “the concern” she may have caused, saying that she “accepted the court’s stern criticism”. Her lawyers said Kim had not decided whether she would appeal against the decision.

Prosecutors at Kim’s final hearing in December said she had “stood above the law” and colluded with the Unification Church to undermine “the constitutionally mandated separation of religion and state”.

Min Joong-ki, a Prosecutor on the case, said at the time that South Korea’s institutions were “severely undermined by abuses of power” committed by Kim.

On Wednesday, prosecutors called the ruling “hard to accept” and said they would appeal. The former first lady previously denied all charges against her, claiming the allegations were “deeply unjust” in her final testimony last month.

She still faces two additional trials on bribery and Political Parties Act violations over allegations that she arranged the mass enrolment of more than 2,400 Unification Church followers into Yoon’s conservative People Power Party."

Free Inquiry Magazine: The Prophet and the Pathologist: Stephen Kent, Massimo Introvigne, and the Battle for an Honest Study of Religion

"Religious apologists have a playbook for scholars who get too close to the truth. That playbook is a dog-eared, reliable little volume passed down through generations of believers who find the disinfectant of sunlight a bit too harsh for their tastes. My first thought after reading Massimo Introvigne’s scathing review of a new book by Stephen Kent, whom I should note was my doctoral supervisor many years ago, was that this was just another case of an apologist attacking a skeptic. The pattern is predictable: dismiss challenging scholarship as reductive, invoke the specter of persecution, and wrap methodological objections in the language of intellectual sophistication. Recall how scholarly critics of Scientology are routinely dismissed. When researchers document the organization’s aggressive litigation tactics or financial practices, apologists don’t engage with the evidence. They instead argue that such reductive approaches miss the authentic spiritual experiences of believers. Academic methodology gets reframed as antireligious bias, and suddenly you’re not debating facts but defending your right to ask uncomfortable questions in the first place.

But this skirmish represents something far more troubling than simply a negative book review. A deeper look reveals the extent to which religious apologetics has gained a foothold in ostensibly secular academic disciplines, creating an intellectual environment where critical inquiry is often treated as a form of bigotry. This cynical inversion turns the tools of social justice into a shield for potential abuse.

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